2011 Chevy Cruze vs. 2012 Ford Focus and Three More Compacts

Startup Sedans: Five perfectly respectable rides for up-and-comers establish a new standard for compact sedans.

Even if two weeks’ worth of Maruchan ramen drains your savings account, there’s something about a rusting mid-’90s Accord on sagging springs that fails to inspire confidence among financial backers or real-estate agents. And when you and the missus are just starting out, you feel that need to be taken seriously more acutely than most. There are certainly cheaper new cars than the group gathered here, but—wrong as it may be—“cheap” is the only reputation many B-segment cars have.

Fortunately, respectability is booming among compact sedans as the class itself matures alongside its target customers. All five of the cars gathered here are new within the last two years, with the Hyundai Elantra, the Ford Focus, and the Volkswagen Jetta fresh off their debuts. And, while all five have entry prices of less than $17,000, an essential part of the startup mind-set is pretending you’ve already made it. We therefore checked out an example of each car possessing a sticker fiddled appropriately upmarket, with optional engines, automatic transmissions, and uplevel trims, landing them in the $23,000-to-$26,000 range. (Regrettably, there was no way to achieve stick-shift parity in this group.)

The elephant not in this room is the Honda Civic, a bestseller and all-around nice guy. Generation nine of Honda’s compact wonder was on the verge of introduction as this was written and thus unavailable for our testing, but watch for a mano a mano between the Honda and the winner of this comparo in an upcoming issue.

For now, our reigning segment champion is the Mazda 3, which prevailed over a Kia Forte and a Volkswagen Golf in a previous comparo . Newish last year, the 3 rides on a platform largely unchanged from the car that was introduced in 2004. Not a problem, we said, naming it to our 10Best list for 2010.

On sale in Europe for two years already, the Chevrolet Cruze is actually older than the 3, but it is newer to the U.S. market. It rides on a platform that shares virtually nothing with its predecessor—a good start. In replacing the Cobalt, the Cruze had small shoes to fill, and it has positively exploded their seams. In our first test, we said, “a Cruze, in a comparison test right now, might very well win.”

Ford’s 2012 Focus, like the Cruze, is the result of a domestic automaker exploiting a global platform. In this case, “global” means the Focus was developed by a crew in Germany and will be sold, with only minor variations, just about everywhere but the International Space Station (the destination and delivery charge would be prohibitively steep). The car’s underpinnings are similar to those of the European Focus for which we’ve pined ever since our last-gen Focus was haphazardly warmed over in 2005 (and again in 2008). A hatchback is available, but we tapped a sedan for this test.

Hyundai’s Elantra is also brand-new. Once a tinny, cheap emblem of automotive desperation, the 2011 Elantra arrives on the scene with a glut of features and a sense of style that hardly existed anywhere in the sedan market 10 years ago, let alone in such an affordable class. Whether or not we like the look (most of us do), we respect that Hyundai dove into the deep end; with the exception of the Focus, nothing else here comes even close to having such a cohesive look

Rounding out the roster is the VW Jetta. Having failed to attract a suitable sales base as a semi-premium car—with pricing and content halfway between the compact and mid-size classes—the Jetta is now embracing the austerity it once tried to live above. Alongside a big bump in interior volume, the 2011 VW gets a substantial price cut, thanks to the addition of a don’t-go-anywhere-near-it base model with an overmatched 115-hp, 2.0-liter four-cylinder. But any Jetta equipped with the more desirable 2.5-liter inline-five still carries a premium of at least a thousand bucks more than the entry-level prices of the four other cars here. The enlarged Jetta now takes direct aim at the heart of the segment. But that heart is beating stronger than ever.